Indie Type Designers

For the month of August, a series of guest posters will be filling in on DWL with daily posts. Today’s posts come to you from Gerren Lamson of Creative Market. For more from Gerren, be sure to check out his shop and follow him on Twitter. Enjoy!

Recently, I’ve noticed that there is a growing number of designers who are learning how to design typefaces, code them into a fonts (or font families), and sell them on their personal websites and Creative Market. They all seem to be driven purely by the passion for creating beautiful typefaces, and I’m shocked at the quality that is being produced by these independent creators.

Some of these indie type designers are just starting out, while others have been making great fonts for a few years. Have a look at a few of my favorites.

Fenotype
Emil has been freelancing since 2007, but he’s recently released a batch of stunning, flexible script typefaces over the last two years that are just incredible. A few of my favorites are Voyage, BonBon, Salamander Script and Mercury Script. There are just too many scripts to choose from!

Kyle Wayne Benson
Kyle has been pumping out some great, clean display and text typefaces. All of his font families seem to be informed by historic type research mixed with his own experiments and personality.

Kimmy Design
Kimmy has been practicing design for about 3 years, and she’s already producing some fantastic fonts. Ranging from hand-drawn to historic printmaking styles, her typographic aesthetic could enrich any brand’s promotional materials.

Hold Fast Foundry
When he’s not designing for Mars Hills, Mattox has kept himself very busy crafting vintage display typefaces inspired by the early days of ‘Mercia. His latest round of fonts all received a fun naming convention: Prohibition, Gin, Abolition and Bourbon.

Laura Worthington
While she’s not new to design, Laura continues to impress as she explores new sophisticated typographic styles with each new font she creates. Her veteran design skills afford her the ability to diversify the personality she imbues into each new typeface. My favorite fonts by Laura are Mandeville, Harlean, Hummingbird, Funkydori and Yana.

Gumpita Rahayu
Gumpita plays with victorian qualities and embellishments with his type design, as evident in Rocca and Companion. He expounds beyond the bold display look by offering rich glyph sets, including latin characters, european diacritics and cyrillic characters.

Yellow Design Studio
Ryan is a very prolific type designer. He’s well versed in display and text stylings respectively, and is known for producing large font families that offer great flexibility and deep sets of alternates. He’s particularly good of the distressed aesthetic. My favorite fonts by Ryan are Verb Condensed, Veneer, Thirsty Script Rough, and Magesta Script.

Decade Type FoundryIn 2008, Gilang finished school, started freelancing, and working on expressive display typefaces. His recent experiments have resulted in very rich letter forms that exude attention to and a love of details. My favorites are Appleton, National Currency, Hustlers, and American Brewery.